Blockchain Gaming Unconference Outcomes

A workshop on understanding the challenges around designing and implementing blockchain games.

Ubisoft, Web3 Foundation, and Blockchain Game Alliance recently held a workshop in Paris just before EthCC that brought together some of the leading development teams (e.g. Xaya, Darwinia, Sandbox, Usetech, EverdreamSoft, Kronoverse) in blockchain gaming. The goal of the workshop was to host something fun, collaborative and memorable. The attendees were an eclectic mix of developers building games on top of a variety of blockchain tech stacks, including Bitcoin-forks, Ethereum, Ethereum sidechains and Substrate.

Regardless of the teams’ differing views on how to build a blockchain game and which tech stack is the best to use, everyone came together to discuss the existing challenges that all teams face as well as how to overcome these shortcomings.

The workshop was followed by a group-work session in the afternoon where attendees gathered into teams to compete against each other. The challenge was to design a blockchain game based upon a random unseen scenario. Winners of the competition were presented with unique ERC-20 tokens from Ubisoft!

Discussion of Major Challenges

In the morning we kicked with a discussion on the current major challenges blockchain gaming faces. These challenges included the pain points for developers as well as for the players. Naturally, the two sets of challenges are linked.

A brief summary of the challenges are as follows:

• Usability — one of the most important points of gaming is providing software that’s easy to use and widely accessible. Dealing with current blockchain technology presents multiple hurdles and results in a poor user experience.
• Scalability — this is another notorious sticking point of blockchain technology and comes in multiple flavors, but ultimately means there are limits to the complexity and speed of game play. A possible trade-off with current technology is to sacrifice decentralization for scalability.
• Consensus / Finality — somewhat related to scaling, but players expect their actions (e.g. movement or in-game trades) to be final. Breaking that expectation is seen as very bad for gameplay.
• Economics — can be split into two major concerns: sustainability of the ecosystem and the developers, and the in-game economics. Open-source software forces a new business model than many traditional game developers companies are not familiar with. Once a blockchain game is deployed, it is difficult to modify the economics of a game world.
• Regulations — still in a grey zone for most countries. The exact legal status is not always clear or well understood. This was seen as undesirable for inviting major players.
• Governance — this is a known challenge across current blockchain networks. Not everyone agrees on the best method for governance, although it is seen as one of the most important topics for community sustainability.
• Standards — convergence to a common set of standards would make development easier.
• Integration with existing frameworks — to be successful as a gaming blockchain the respective tech stacks should include integration with the popular game engines.
• Illegal & undesirable content — we desire to uphold the principles of privacy and censorship resistance but this presents the challenge of avoiding spam while maintaining Sybil resistance.
• Bots — this point is related to the above about undesirable content , where a player could automate a lot of the game mechanics. This behavior may be legal at the blockchain level, i.e. doesn’t break spam protection, but inside the game the behavior may be highly undesirable.
• Oracles (data sources) — if the game requires off-chain data it should be accurate, but also best if there is no single point of failure.

Group Work Competition

In the afternoon, we ran a group-work session where attendees split up into teams to design a blockchain game. Each team picked one card at random from three different categories:

• Genre — the game genre
• Digital Asset Quirks — games had to include some form of asset
• Infrastructure Quirks — a particular infrastructure constraint.

An example scenario could be a Real Time Strategy game that uses NFTs and is controlled by a DAO.

Satisfying the constraints shown on the three cards was the most important “rule” of the game, otherwise the teams were free to pick whatever tech stack they desired and to take some creative liberties. As it was a competition, each team was required to present their game to the rest of the audience and demonstrate that they understood the current limitations of the technology (as discussed in the morning session).

While each participant had strong views about the right way to build their own product, for this session they had to put those ideals aside and figure out what was the best approach by finding consensus within their groups.

The differing perspectives allowed each team member to share their unique insights from the lessons they’ve learned in this fledgling industry, while finding consensus on how to tackle the blind challenge.

Presentations

The depth of knowledge and experience of each team was evident during the presentation session at the end of the day.

Each team presented a plausible game that could be built with today’s technology and were able to deflect questions from the audience on pain points.

While presenting, team captains drew a card from an unannounced fourth category. This last category presented a doom scenario: these cards potentially encompassed several pain points. Poor design during the teamwork session may mean that a doom card could halt the team’s game and bankrupt the development company! Interestingly enough, each turned out to be resilient to the doom scenario they drew.

The Winning Team

The winning team was Clement Lakhal (Sandbox), Shaban Shaame (EverdreamSoft), Sebastian Treguer, Enrique García (Ravalmatic) and Philippe Mercier who all received unique ERC-20 tokens from Ubisoft.

The winning team created a game called “Infinite Explorer” that had the following scenario:

• A space explorer;
• That’s multi-device; and
• Includes the ability to win tickets to a real event.

Their game involved humans finding a new planet to settle on as the solar system is collapsing. Finding and terraforming a new planet was a common goal for all players, but it was still possible to engage in player-versus-player combat. The 20 best teams of the year would receive an NFT that provides entrance to a special real-world event.

The focus was on providing a game that worked well in the browser and on mobile (multi-device) and that a web-wallet could be used to provide easy player on-boarding. The main underlying technology was to use a blockchain with fast blocktime. The delays between blocks would be hidden as best as possible as actions inside gameplay.

The suggested business model was to sell convenience items that would save time, such as resources or improved speed.

About Web3 Foundation

Web3 Foundation funds research and development teams building the foundation of the decentralized web. It was established in Zug, Switzerland by Ethereum co-founder and former chief technology officer Dr. Gavin Wood. Polkadot is the flagship protocol of Web3 Foundation. Visit web3.foundation for more information.

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